Using Material Library / 3ds Max

Verge3D material library is a collection of ready-to-use materials which you can assign to your 3ds Max models. Below is the description of a recommended workflow on how to install and use these materials efficiently.

Featured materials from Verge3D material library.

Installing

Material library is available in Soft8Soft store in the form of the 3ds Max Essential Material Pack.

Simply unzip the archive with a library pack to any folder on your computer. Inside this folder you can find a main .mat file which represents the material collection. There are also numerous .max files (one per material), however in most situations you don't need to touch them.

The textures used in the materials are located in the material_maps folder. The folder environments contains 3 variants of HDR images that you can use for the environment (each variant comes in 3 resolutions: 1k, 2k and 4k).

Adding Materials to Project

Before adding material library, make sure your current renderer is set to ART or Arnold. In case of Arnold, you also need to specify the Legacy 3ds Max Map Support option:

Configuring Arnold renderer with Legacy 3ds Max Map Support

In order to use a library material in a project, invoke the Open Material Library... option in the Material/Map Browser:

Then navigate to the library folder, select Verge3D 3ds Max Essential Material Pack.mat file and click Open:

The list of materials should appear in the Material/Map Browser:

To assign any of these to a model, select a model, then drag material to the View area, then click on the material by using right mouse button, then select Assign Material to Selection:

Setting up the Environment

Physical materials require the environment to be set up, otherwise the materials will look dark and non-reflective. The environment is already set up in Verge3D's default cube project which you can use as a basis for your own app.

Alternatively, you can configure the environment from scratch as shown in this video tutorial. You can use either of HDR textures in the environments folder of a material pack for this purpose.

UV Mapping

Most materials in the library require models to be UV-mapped. Consider unwrapping your models for best results.

Relocating Textures to App Folder

For the sake of integrity of your application (which is important if you're transferring your project sources to a third party), you can save the textures used by appended materials in the app folder as described below.

Open the Resource Collector utility, then specify path to your project. Make sure that Collect Bitmaps is checked, also enable the Update Materials option. Collect your files by clicking on the Begin button:

You can check the integrity of your application by moving its folder to another location in your file system. Open the max file and make sure no errors with missing assets are generated.

Got Questions?

Feel free to ask on the forums!